"A group of European regulators has written to Google calling on it to halt the introduction of its new privacy policy, saying it needs to investigate whether the proposals sufficiently protect users' personal data." I'd rather regulators are on top of this now than when it's too late and we're all plugged into the Google Hivemind Overlord.

What is annoying me is the double standard: if you change quietly your privacy policy and never offer to your users a real fine grained opt-out page, no single government agency really cares and the issue gets confined to some few tech sites who has editor that likes privacy related issues.

But if you change your privacy policy publicly, cares to explain it, and offer your users a page to control their personal data to a rather high degree (if sided with others), you get punished with a investigation from a governmental agency and must wait for their good will.

So, EU regulators must investigate not only Google, but also Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon... and every single service with more than 5 million users. And actively punish with fines the ones that change their privacy policy without notifying their users.

Attributing the concern to the transparency of the changes seems like a false premise to me.

Could the oversight be because Google has a de facto monopoly on web search? Could it be that the concern arises from Google claiming they wouldn't do such things for the last ten years? Could it be because, although admittedly complex, the previous policy did provide greater granularity and chances to opt-out?

What is annoying me is the double standard: if you change quietly your privacy policy and never offer to your users a real fine grained opt-out page, no single government agency really cares and the issue gets confined to some few tech sites who has editor that likes privacy related issues.

But if you change your privacy policy publicly, cares to explain it, and offer your users a page to control their personal data to a rather high degree (if sided with others), you get punished with a investigation from a governmental agency and must wait for their good will.

So, EU regulators must investigate not only Google, but also Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon... and every single service with more than 5 million users. And actively punish with fines the ones that change their privacy policy without notifying their users.

Here's the problem. I may want to use GMail and Google Search. But I don't want my searches correlated with my GMail ID. It's illegal for Google to tie the two together.